Recently the IA Institute list was discussing faceted search interfaces and Rashmi Sinha wrote “Now you can build your very own faceted metadata navigation system based on Flamenco Download (thank Marti Hearst, not me. I have not worked on Flamenco in a little while).”
Flamenco was developed at SIMS (UC Berkeley). Sinha, who was involved with it a while back, says, “The interface is somewhat busy, but it supports more complex information finding tasks very well (we did a lot of testing with architects using an architectural image database).”
If you’re like me, “faceted metadata” is confusing enough without tying it to “navigation system,” in which case viewing a live example may help.
If you want to know more, Sinha also posted links to two articles for further reading.
